Core to quad or Sandy Bridge

Harith AslamSep 4, 2011, 9:10 AM

i'm looking for a gaming rig in $550 with the monitor. i hope i get the HD 6850, if not then HD6790 will have to do. 4 GB RAM, and 450W psu will do, ut im stuck on the processor. i wanna play mw3 and bf3 and newer games on high settings and a guy told me a quad core CPU would be best, but with my budget, i cant fit in i5 at the moment.i live in PAkistan where AMD is rarely availible, and if it even is, it costs more. plz help me with this, or if you want to, can you plz plz give me suggestions on my rig. feel free...thanks

a core i3 2100 is a good budget intel processor. for games it is equivelant, and in some games faster, than a phenom x4 at 3.5 ghz. Do not be dishartened that it is dual core, it has hyperthreading which helps a bit with threaded apps, and 2 very fast cores. That paired with a 6850 and 4 gig of ram will run pretty nicely.

^ Agreed.I wouldn't recommend 18.5" monitor because it has the resolution equivalent of a laptop: only 1366x768. It also defeats the purpose of getting HD 6850 or 6790.Save some more money, get 21.5" or 23" (both have 1920x1080 resolution) and you will never regret it.

Intel DH67BL is a solid choice. It has USB 3.0 and even Lucid Virtu (GPU virtualization) which is invaluable for such an inexpensive board.

But if you don't care about Virtu, MSI H67MA-E45 is also worth a look (if you can find it in your country).It's about the same price as DH67BL and it has about the same feature set (minus Virtu).It has a little advantage in build quality, though; it uses all-solid capacitors. There aren't any legacy PCI slots but I don't think you'll need them either.